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(2) – What Exactly Does It Do?
Continuing from the last post, the founder’s name is Reza, and what exactly do they do? To sum it up in one sentence, they are an AI Coordinator for maintenance work for property management companies.
Normally, if it’s an industry I’m not familiar with, I wouldn’t be that interested in a product or service that simply assists with efficiency. But this happens to be my area of expertise. As my long-time followers know, part of our portfolio includes real estate, and we have a significant number of shareholders and buildings. The biggest problem with this sector is that it doesn’t make money but requires a lot of work. We spend 90% of our labor and energy on these assets, but the returns are negative. Meanwhile, other assets that we do have much better liquidity, require virtually no work (completely passive) and have much higher yields (easily double digit returns within 6-12 month), yet only take up 10% of our time and labor. So we’ve long adopted a strategy of selling off real estate when time is right, and for the past few years, we’ve been shrinking this part of our business. The issues in real estate are so many that I even wrote a series of posts complaining about them. If you’ve read them, you know how exhausting it can be. For example, some of the titles are “The Pitfalls Before Starting Construction,” “The Pitfalls After Starting Construction,” “How Does It Feel to Spend Money Like Water,” and so on… There are so many frustrations here, I could go on for days, but let’s leave it at that 😂
So, based on my past experiences, I know the pain is real. When I first heard about their business, I thought, “Wow, this is great! They clearly address a major pain point in the market!” We ourselves stopped dealing with real estate because it was too painful 😂. Currently, the market has only two extreme solutions for property management: one is just software to increase efficiency, but the property management companies still have to do all the work; the other is outsourcing to a service provider, but it’s expensive, error-prone, and not transparent. There isn’t really a middle ground. Their solution is an AI that can transparently complete all the tasks, yet still be supervised by the property management company. If the property management company wants to add human involvement, they can intervene; if they don’t want to do anything themselves, the AI can handle everything. For example, the AI can analyze repair issues, find contractors, negotiate with suppliers, lower prices, determine who will do the work, set prices, schedule dates, and so on. It handles all these small, tedious tasks, and the property management company can oversee the entire process.
Essentially, they have created the middle ground solution.
Of course, it’s great that they’ve accurately identified the pain point, but the key question is whether the market agrees with that. Their growth has been over 20% per month (yes, per month!) and it’s accelerating. Their ARR has already exceeded 1.5M, and more detailed data will be shared later, but this growth rate already validates the market demand. It seems we’re not the only ones feeling the pain. So how big is the market, and how much more room for growth is there?
Reza says, “Did you know that just in the U.S. alone, there are about 350,000 property management companies? At any given time, there are 250,000 repair purchase orders (POs) with contracts. The annual spend on maintenance is between 1 and 2 trillion dollars! And do you know how much of that goes to middlemen?”
Till next time!